1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to bursting in a content management system.
2. Background Art
A content management system (CMS) allows many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content. The rules in a CMS assure that content that comes into or out of the system or that is linked to meets desired criteria specified in the rules.
Known content management systems check their rules when content comes into or out of the repository. If a rule is satisfied, the CMS may perform subsequent processing on the content. Known content management systems may include rules related to bursting, linking, and synchronization. Bursting rules govern how a document is bursted, or broken into individual chunks, when the document is imported or checked into the repository. By bursting a document into chunks, the individual chunks may be potentially reused later by a different author. Linking rules are used for importing and associating objects related to a CMS document based on particular elements or attributes from the document as specified by the rules. For example, an XML document that references external images can take advantage of linking rules so that relationships between the XML content and the external images are automatically created when the document is imported or checked into the repository. Another kind of linking rule governs what content in a repository a user may link to in a document that will be subsequently checked into the repository. Synchronization rules govern synchronization between content and metadata related to the content. For example, a synchronization rule may specify that whenever a specified CMS attribute is changed, a particular piece of XML in the content should be automatically updated with that attribute's value.
Bursting rules allow an element in a document to be saved as it's own document (i.e., object) in the CMS so the element may be reused by other authors. These bursting rules can be applied automatically by the CMS when a document is imported or checked into the repository (system-level bursting). In addition, a user may explicitly command bursting of one or more elements in a document while editing a document (user-level bursting). When system-level bursting is used, it is difficult for a system administrator to determine how sensitive to make the bursting rules. If the bursting rules generate larger chunks, then there will not be enough reuse in the system to make it effective, while if the bursting rules generate smaller chunks, reusability increases, but system performance decreases. When user-level bursting is used (i.e. when the responsibility of bursting is left to authors), content reuse is significantly reduced as it is difficult for authors to know which elements of their document are good candidates for reuse. Without a way to burst documents in a CMS more intelligently, the efficient reuse of content in a content management system will be impaired.